Some of this may be obvious or remedial. Not meaning to patronize anyone, but it’s the kind of stuff I wish I’d been taught back when I was a young, noobsauce lad.
1. I do like finger ducts https://www.fs.com/products/29038.html All you end up with being visible is a few inches going down into the duct. The downside (or upside?) is someone can hide a lot of sin behind the cover. 2. My current employer introduced me to lacing bars <https://www.showmecables.com/middle-atlantic-90-bend-round-lacer-bar-4-inch-offset-10-pack?utm_campaign=PMax:_(ROI)_Smart_Shopping_-_Patch_Panels/_Racks_&_Cabinets&keyword=&gclid=Cj0KCQjwjryjBhD0ARIsAMLvnF9B-3QSBCX8y6fD9_Tb5INbKMxOi9jVRUXO2LRa7Cu5Z1PipoEFHPgaAnGdEALw_wcB> . Follow the link for a decent example. That’s not a bad price for a 10 pack either; my boss pays crazy money for Panduit brand. They consume zero rack units, so you can add them to existing deployment without having to move anything. I like 4” depth because you can make a decent sweeping turn onto the lacing bar, and you can put your label on the straight part coming out of the switch port and it will be front and center where you can read it without having to wiggle anything. Also look for bars with straight 90 degree turns. A lot of them angle inwards which can interfere with using the ports on the far left and right of a switch. I’m not sure why the inward bend is so common, but it’s to be avoided if you’re using it for network equipment. 3. Maybe stating the obvious, but you want to work with standard length patch cables because fiber terminations too time consuming compared to a $5 cable. So step one is space your equipment so a 1m, 2m, 3m, 5m, or 10m cable reaches with just a little slack. Some vendors also have 7m and 0.5m, but in any case you want to avoid the need for any custom length cables. Changing the spacing on already deployed equipment could be a big job, so maybe you have to work with what’s there. 4. You’re avoiding having excessive slack, but what slack you have gets stored in the vertical cable manager, not the horizontal one. So if anything, oversize the vertical one. Ideally you have no more than 1-2m of slack, and you just have it come down one side of the cable manager, make a U-turn and come up the other side. If you do have to have a coil, make it as neat as possible, make the diameter about the same as the width of the vertical cable manager, place it near the attachment points in the vertical cable manager, wrap the coil with your preferred wire wrap so you can handle it as one unit, and then attach each side of the coil to opposite sides of the cable manager. Do all of that and you won’t have it get tangled on anything, but no matter what you do a coil will occupy more space than just a U-turn. I’d rather make a U-turn all the way to the floor than make a coil, but when I have to have them I put them where they will not consume space that was needed for other cables (and that’s usually the bottom). To make the neat coil, hook up both ends of the cable and route them nicely, then pull the slack out from the middle until you’re holding the midpoint of the slack, make one loop of the desired size. Hold that one loop flat and rotate it 180 degrees to criss-cross the two ends of cable, then flip it forwards using the criss-cross like a hinge. Do another 180 degree twist, and flip forward again. Repeat until the coil is all the way back to the vertical manager. That might need a video to explain it better. It also might be remedial, but it’s stuff I wish someone had shown me when I was 18-20. 5. Wire wraps: I always used zip ties in the past, and I’m still faster with zip ties. My current employer insists on Velcro. You can get a good outcome either way, but complaint with zip ties is you can overtighten and crimp a cable. That won’t hurt copper, but it honestly could hurt a fiber jumper. My complaint with Velcro is that it’s harder to tighten it enough. You can get it tight with practice, I’d say you could also learn with practice to not over tighten a zip tie, but whatever. They’re both cheap and they’re both serviceable. If you can’t trust every person to not crush cables with zip ties then get big rolls of Velcro from Amazon and tell them they have to use that. 6. Labels: self laminating cable labels. Self laminating cable labels. Self laminating cable labels. Did I mention self laminating cable labels? Since I have learned of these things I will never go back to any other method. Laser printer sheets for when you want to prep a whole bunch at once, and also a portable printer for when you’re doing just one or two. There are Panduit labels which are high quality and cost literally hundreds of dollars for a box of label sheets. Those are great if you have too much capital and need to spend some to reduce your tax liability, but for those of us on WISP level budgets there’s the Mr Label MR-610 on Amazon. Mr Label pities the fool who doesn’t label his cables. I’m sure most brands of portable label printer will sell you rolls of self laminating label tape. From whatever brand you can get the printer for $100 and they will hose you for $30/roll on the tape. I say they can hose me all day long because I want what they’re selling. For fiber jumpers they have too small of a diameter for most labels, but you can add a sleeve around it and put the label on the sleeve. Panduit sells a product for that, or you can cut up plastic drinking straws and slit them down the side. Or cut sections of small diameter split wire loom……same thing only different. 7. Have standards and enforce them. a. Anything going vertically in the rack has to go sideways first. The exception is a switch with a patch panel directly above or below it. In that case you can use a 6” jumper (or 0.5 meter if it’s fiber). If the cable has to cross another piece of equipment then it has to go to the side first and then vertical, otherwise you’re blocking access to the equipment you’re crossing. b. Every cable has to be tied down. Any kind of cordage has limited ways to be straight and infinite ways to be tangled. If it’s not tied down then normal entropy effects will turn it to spaghetti over time. This is supported by an area of mathematical study called “knot theory”, so I’m telling you that is a provable fact and not just some folksy saying. c. Every cable gets labeled. I suggest 3 lines. 1. The device and port at one end of the cable. 2. The Device and port at the other end. 3. Description of purpose. “Panel 2, port 75”, “Switch 01, port et5/1”, “Main St PON”. You can make whatever standard you want, but with that method you can pick a cable up off the floor and know where it’s supposed to go without having to ask anybody or reference any other documentation. It’s helpful to know what it’s for too of course. You can call the office and say “Main St PON was accidentally unplugged, might have been down for up to 15 minutes.” d. When adding a new cable alongside existing cables it’s critical for the tech to pay attention to what it’s passing through and around. In my experience it’s safest to add a new cable behind existing ones. You’re just less likely to go through some other cable’s slack loop or any other thing that’ll screw you over later. e. Any non-standard cabling done during an emergency has to be addressed and brought up to standard within x business days. f. Sometimes temporary solutions are “temporary” for a decade, so that can’t be an excuse to leave something half assed in place. g. Enforcement may require an audit process, you could do periodic site visits, or demand pictures with each site visit and provide a place to upload them where a manager can look at them. h. Managers should understand that quality work takes time. In those pictures of data centers with pristine cabling those people probably spent 10x the labor hours that would have been spent on a spaghetti job. From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Forrest Christian (List Account) Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2023 2:44 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Fiber (and I guess CAT5) cable management in racks 100% patch panels eventually. But yes, switches and patch panels. What I'm asking about is generally "Front of rack patch cable management". Not the back, not the cables into the rack, not power cords on back of equipment. Simply port-to-port patch panel on the front. On Wed, May 24, 2023 at 12:42 PM Josh Luthman <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Full of what? Switches and patch panels? On Wed, May 24, 2023 at 2:37 PM Forrest Christian (List Account) <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Ok let me clarify. (Accidentally hit send since it's apparently the same hotkey to send on gmail as I use elsewhere for "insert a return without sending") Think 10 years of neglect and basically no front-side cable management. Cables everywhere. Not as bad as some reddit pictures, but definitely a good 'before' picture. We're starting from scratch here. All that exists is some side of 2 post rack cable management (rings) which holds existing cat5 cables to some patch panels. It's pretty much full too.... On Wed, May 24, 2023 at 12:32 PM Forrest Christian (List Account) <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Nope. On Wed, May 24, 2023 at 12:21 PM Josh Luthman <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Share a picture of what you have now? On Wed, May 24, 2023 at 2:15 PM Forrest Christian (List Account) <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Thanks to the (not) fun labor situation anymore, I've gotten sucked back into some more of the day to day design stuff at the WISP, specifically some of the server/fiber infrastructure at the head end. It's time for me to just fix the cable management in the racks, which apparently the previous "owners" of this particular portion of the network didn't feel was important, or probably more accurately, didn't know how to fix. I'm looking for ANY options which have been proven to work, don't let the following dissuade suggesting a specific option. Right now, what I'm thinking is to add a "0RU" fiber/cable management "tray" below each 1U switch and/or fiber patch panel, then drag that out to a vertical riser which is in front of the rack. Note that this is for the open relay racks, not for closed server racks, not sure what to do there. -- - Forrest -- AF mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- - Forrest -- - Forrest -- AF mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- - Forrest
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